01The short version
A vault coin is a memecoin with a job. Every trade pays a fee, and the fees buy one specific graded Pokémon card.
Each coin launches with its own vault: a smart contract that receives the coin's trading fees. The vault's rules are fixed at launch: which card it buys, the lowest grade it accepts, the most it may pay, and whether it ever sells. The cards are bought and stored by professional custodians, and every payment is published on-chain, so anyone can follow the money from trade to card.
- 1A tradeSomeone buys or sells the coin.
- 2A feeThe coin fee plus Pons's 1% base fee.
- 3The vaultReceives the coin's share of every fee.
- 4The cardGraded copies, bought and held by a custodian.
02Launching a coin
A coin launches in one transaction, with no presale and no team allocation.
Coins launch through Pons V2 on Robinhood Chain. Each has a fixed supply of 1,000,000,000 and is paired with ETH or USDG. Trading starts on a Pons bonding curve, a price curve that rises as people buy. At about 4.2 ETH the coin graduates: its liquidity moves into a Uniswap V4 pool that is locked permanently. Nobody can withdraw it, including Corner and the launcher.
The launcher may buy some of the coin in the same transaction, capped at 5% of supply (about 0.09 ETH at the opening price). Launching costs the Pons launch fee, currently 0.0005 ETH, plus gas. The coin's image link, description and social links are stored on-chain, so they are kept short: 512 bytes for the image link, 2,048 for the description and 256 per social link.
03Where the fees go
Almost all of every trading fee goes to the coin's vault.
Every trade pays two fees: the coin fee the launcher picked (1%, 3%, 5% or 10%, which Pons calls the creator tax) and Pons's 1% base fee. The vault receives all of the coin fee and 70% of the base fee. Pons keeps the other 30% of the base fee. Corner takes 1% of what each vault receives to buy back and burn $CORNER.
On a $1,000 trade, traders pay $40.00 in fees (4%).
- To the vaultAll of the coin fee, plus 70% of the 1% base fee, minus Corner's 1%
- $36.63
- Kept by PonsThe other 30% of the 1% base fee
- $3.00
- To the $CORNER buyback1% of what the vault receives
- $0.37
Outside liquidity can't skim the fees
Pons pools pay liquidity providers 0%, and every fee is collected by Pons's hook, the code that runs on each trade. Anyone can add liquidity, but it earns nothing from trades, so it can't take the vault's income. The locked launch liquidity is the market.
Collecting fees
Fees build up at Pons until someone collects them, and anyone can. The vault page has a button for it (the contract function is harvest()). It claims everything Pons holds for the vault and sends 1% to the $CORNER buyback. Fees arrive in the coin's pair asset, ETH or USDG.
Some fees arrive later
Before graduation, fees sit on the curve in ETH or USDG and can be collected right away. After graduation, some fees are paid in the coin itself. Pons's automation converts those to ETH or USDG first, so they reach the vault with a delay. The vault can always claim what it is already owed.
04Locked to one card
Each vault is locked to one exact card, picked from a card database and never typed in by hand.
The launcher finds the card in TCGdex, an open Pokémon card database, then sets the printing (for example 1st Edition), the minimum grade, the grading companies accepted (PSA, BGS, CGC, SGC, TAG) and the custodians allowed to hold it. Together these make the vault's card record.
The record is published in full with the launch, and its fingerprint (a keccak256 hash) is stored in the vault forever. Anyone can recompute the fingerprint from the published record and check that the two match. Every vault page does this for you.
The rest of the rules
Alongside the card, the launcher sets how much of the copies for sale the vault aims to own, the most it may pay over fair value (never more than 50%), the share of its peak holdings it must never sell below, and, for Squeeze vaults, the price at which it sells. Fair value and copies for sale come from the Corner Index. None of these rules can be edited after launch.
05Three ways to hold
Every vault picks one of three modes at launch. The mode decides if, and when, it sells.
| Mode | What the vault does | Fixed limits |
|---|---|---|
| Diamond | The vault accumulates cards and holds every one of them. Nothing is ever sold. | Keeps 100% of its peak holdings. No planned exit. |
| Band | The vault buys under fair value and may trim above it, but never below half its peak holdings. | Keeps at least 50% of its peak holdings. No planned exit. |
| Squeeze | The vault buys until it owns its target share, then sells once the price reaches the multiple of its average cost set at launch. | Sells at 1.5x to 20x its average cost. Keeps a share of peak holdings set by the launcher. |
06Buying and storing cards
Graded cards are physical, so a person buys them, and the contracts limit what that person can do with the money.
Graded cards aren't on-chain assets a contract can buy by itself. They are stored by custodians such as Courtyard, Collector Crypt and Phygitals, which hold the slab and issue a tokenized claim on it.
Corner's operator finds slabs that match the card record, pays through an approved address and records a purchase receipt on-chain with every payment. The contracts limit how much can move, how fast and to where. They can't check that the card matches the record, or that the price was within the vault's limit. That part is checked in public: every payment can be matched to the custodian's record and to the Corner Index price that day.
07Guardrails
The contracts make it impossible to pull the trading pool or drain a vault quickly. What a vault buys relies on the operator following its rules in public.
- Spending is capped. At most 50% of a vault can leave at once. That allowance refills gradually over 7 days, so at most about 75% can leave in any 7-day window, and draining a vault takes weeks.
- Only approved addresses. Only Corner's operator can spend, and only to addresses on the launchpad's approved list: purchase settlement addresses and bridge adapters.
- Changes wait 3 days in public. A new operator or spending address only takes effect after a public 3-day notice. If it isn't applied within 7 days after that, it lapses.
- The rules are permanent. The card record, mode and limits are stored at launch, and no function can change them.
- The vault never sells its own coin. If any of the coin reaches the vault, anyone can burn it with
burnAsset(). - No back door. Collecting fees, spending under the limits and burning are the only ways money moves.
Who enforces what
| Rule | Enforced by |
|---|---|
| The launch liquidity is locked in the Uniswap V4 pool forever | Pons contracts |
| All trading fees go through Pons's hook; outside liquidity earns 0% | Pons contracts |
| The vault receives the coin's fees and can't hand that role to anyone else | Corner contracts |
| The card record and the rest of the rules can't be edited | Corner contracts |
| Only the operator can spend, and only to approved addresses | Corner contracts |
| At most 50% of a vault leaves at once; the allowance refills gradually over 7 days | Corner contracts |
| New operators and spending addresses wait 3 days in public | Corner contracts |
| The vault never sells its own coin; any it receives is burned | Corner contracts |
| Fees stay with the vault unless Pons's owner uses its 3-day timelock | Pons multisig |
| Cards bought match the card record | Operator, checked in public |
| The price paid is within the vault's limit over fair value | Operator, checked against the Corner Index |
| Selling follows the vault's mode | Operator, checked in public |
| Cards stay with the named custodians | Custodian and operator |
08Who can change what
Corner and Pons each keep a few narrow powers, and both have to use them in public.
Corner
The launchpad is owned by a Corner multisig, a wallet that needs several signers to act.
- It can change who may launch and which pair assets are allowed. That only affects future launches.
- It can point vault spending at a new address only after a public 3-day notice, and spending stays within the vault's limit.
- It can remove an operator or address immediately, which only reduces what can happen to vault money.
- It can't give up ownership, so a compromised operator can always be removed.
- It can't touch the locked liquidity, change a coin's fee or edit a vault's rules.
Pons
Pons's owner, also a multisig, can redirect a coin's creator fees (the fees that go to its vault) after a public 3-day timelock. It is the one outside party with power over the fee stream, and we would rather you hear it from us. The vault keeps what it was already owed and can still claim it after a redirect. If Pons's owner ever sends the vault fees in the coin itself, the vault burns them. It never sells them.
09$CORNER
1% of every vault's fee income buys back and burns $CORNER.
That share goes to Corner's fee collector, which can only forward it to a buyback contract that buys and burns $CORNER. Pointing it at a new buyback contract takes the same 3-day public notice. $CORNER is coming. Until it launches, the share builds up in the collector.
10Risks
Read these before you buy.
- Vault coins are memecoins. Their price can fall to near zero.
- Holding a coin gives no legal claim on the vault or its cards.
- Card prices can fall, as Kabuto showed, and custodians can fail.
- The off-chain parts depend on the operator doing what it promised.
- Smart contracts can have bugs, including in Pons and Uniswap V4.
Nothing on this site is investment advice.